Obama says hitting Ryan during budget speech a 'mistake'

9/10/12 8:16 AM EDT

President Obama told author Bob Woodward that he didn't know Rep. Paul Ryan was going to attend at a major speech he delivered last year on spending and debt, and says in retrospect that it was "a mistake" to dress down Ryan and his budget plans to his face in that setting.

In the interview conducted July 11 -- about a month before Ryan was tapped as Mitt Romney's running mate – the president also misstated the first name of the man who is now on the opposing presidential ticket.

"I'll go ahead and say it – I think that I was not aware when I gave that speech that Jack Ryan was going to besitting right there," the president told Woodward according to audio transcripts of their conversations, provided to ABC News.

"And so I did feel, in retrospect, had I known – we literally didn't know he was going to be there until – or I didn't know, until I arrived. I might have modified some of it so that we would leave more negotiations open, because I do think that they felt like we were trying to embarrass him," Obama continued. "We made a mistake."

Ryan had thought the White House invitation to attend the April 2011 speech was an attempt to make peace with House Republicans, but he was "incensed" that the president attacked his budget plan so forcefully with him sitting right in the front row. Ryan later called it a "political broadside," and Woodward writes in his new book that Ryan told Obama economic advisor Gene Sperling that it had "poisoned the well" for future cooperation with the White House.

ABC News reports that Woodward -- whose book "The Price of Politics" is scheduled to be released Tuesday -- said a junior staffer in the White House congressional relations office noticed that only the chairs of the president's Simpson-Bowles fiscal commission were invited to the speech and thought it would be "polite" to extend speech invitations to all the commission members, including those who voted against its recommendations, such as Ryan.